Notes from the Biomass

My advice with slashdot is - the headlines can sometimes point you to an interesting link but for your sanity, stay away from the comments. They're largely from kids who think they're very funny and/or well-informed but in fact are neither.

You make interesting points though. I think open discussion relies on both expert individuals with the time and inclination to guide the debate and curious non-experts who are prepared to listen and learn.

I like slashdot, the same way I like digg. They are both good sites to keep up with the tech world, but I don't really on them to keep track of scientific news nor would I expect the readers to have a lot to say on bio news in the comments. There is so many people there that I tend to skim through the comments in a kind of statistical opinion mode, you get a feeling for what the geek community thinks about it (positive vs negative reaction) and a lot of times you get very good individual comments (sometimes more informative than the initial post). That is why they have such a complex rating schema for the comments, you really have to filter to find good things.

There are important differences between a post in slashdot and a scientific paper. They are very different and will therefore also attract different communities and comments.
A scientific communication has a much longer life and we are used to this. People revisit very old papers all the time because we build on top of previous scientific communications. We also have a very different mentality when it comes to criticizing other people's work because we all went through journal clubs, conferences, peer-review, etc.

Right now I think that the lack of good scientific blogs (and comments) is a general lack of participation. Maybe people are afraid to have their opinions in the open, maybe they think that have to protect their opinions not to get scooped, I really don't know. Even in Nodalpoint that has so many daily visitors we always see the same people making posts and comments and there is no limitations. So, my point is that I would prefer that the main journals would allow unrestricted comments around their papers (just set some guidelines) to spur participation and then if trouble starts react to it by imposing restrictions of some sort.
The usual problem with comments is anonymity but the scientific community is built on identity (names in papers, conference abstracts, institute websites, etc). It would be reasonable for the publishers to restrict comments to people they can identify by linking to published work for example but they would have to set up some kind of scientific id.